Tests Don't Help Teachers Teach, Officials Argue

Boulder, Colo-- Standardized tests, which have become a primary
preoccupation of states and school systems eager to prove the
effectiveness of their educational activities to a skeptical public,
are the focus of growing criticism even by the people who design and
administer them.

The tests often fail to provide teachers with information they can
use to improve the schoolwork of the students who are tested. And the
pervasive use of so-called "minimum-basic-skills" tests in particular
has tended to depress the quality and vitality of the educational
process itself.

These and other criticisms of testing were aired last week by some
of the 225 people gathered here for the twelfth annual Conference on
Large-Scale Assessment, a meeting co-sponsored by the Education
Commission of the States (ecs) and the National Assessment of
Educational Progress (naep).

The subject of the tests' value and purpose was discussed in a
number of the 41 formal sessions at the conference.

"Most standardized tests are by and large ceremonious, and are of
very little use in [the] diagnosis [of a student's academic
weaknesses]," said Edys Quellmalz of the Center for the Study of
Evaluation, a research center funded by the National Institute of
Education that scrutinizes the quality of tests used in schools.

Said Ralph W. Tyler, former chairman of the department of education
at the University of Chicago and a founder of the naep: "What we have
are basically classification tests, which are valuable to
institutions--such as school districts--but not [to] students or
teachers."

Minimum-Basic-Skills Tests

Many here singled out as a principal source of this situation the
minimum-basic-skills tests that have been adopted by many states within
the last five or six years in an effort to respond to the public's
demand for "accountability" in public schools.

"There is a nationwide demand for simplistic answers [to the
problems facing schools]," said Nelson Noggle, a former test developer
who has also evaluated the effectiveness of federally mandated
education programs. "These tests do not ask how well our kids are
learning, but how did we do on a simple test compared to last
year."

"Minimum-competency exams test a narrow range of skills and they do
not result in a better instructional system [in the classroom]," added
Marilyn Averill, a member of the testing staff in the Boulder Valley
Schools in Colorado.

Several of the conference participants, most of whom are responsible
for designing and administering assessments of students and teachers at
the state and local level, expressed frustration at being forced to
create basic-skills tests by policymakers who are under public pressure
to be "accountable"--especially since they feel such tests offer little
information about the overall achievement of a student.

Jack G. Schmidt, a member of the National Assessment staff, offered
another reason for the failure of standardized tests to help the
classroom teacher identify accurately the academic weaknesses in their
students.

"There is clearly a gap," he said, "between what's being taught and
what's being tested; they [states and schools districts] are not
testing what they are teaching."

While minimum-competency testing still seems to have strong support
among the public and many education policymakers, New Jersey, having
declared its basic-skills program a "success," will end its minimum
competency-testing program at the end of this month and in 1984 will
begin using a new statewide examination that will test a wider range of
academic skills.

Stephen Koffler, director of evaluation in New Jersey, said that
school districts in the state "are not getting much useful information
from the [$600,000-a-year or $1.50-per-student] basic-skills testing
program" anymore because high scores on the tests statewide suggest
that New Jersey students now are learning basic skills.

By deciding to introduce a new statewide test that will evaluate a
wider variety of academic skills, New Jersey is adopting a testing
policy that is closer to the one it abandoned in 1976 when it began the
basic-skills testing program.

Programs Developed

New Jersey was one of approximately 35 states that developed testing
programs in the early 1970's to measure students' achievements in a
variety of subjects. The New Jersey achievement-testing program, like
those in the other states, was modeled after the naep

However, when the mimimum-competency-testing movement swept through
the state in the mid-1970's, the programs that sought a more complete
picture of the range of a student's achievements were abandoned because
states could not afford to pay for both these and basic-skills testing,
according to Mr. Koffler.

But, while several testing officials at the meeting asserted that
"the new buzzword in testing is 'excellence',"--at least within the
testing community--there was a general consensus that only when
policymakers such as state legislators or state boards of education
begin to abandon the minimum-basic-skills "mentality" will more states
follow New Jersey's lead.

Participants at the meeting did not see this shift in attitude
taking place in the immediate future.

Ray S. Smith Jr., chairman of the Akansas House education committee
and the only state legislator at the meeting, acknowledged that
"testing for excellence has not received the full attention it should
have.'' But he defended the minimum-competency-testing movement, saying
"[schools] should have never have put us [state legislatures and other
policymakers] in a position where we had to require
minimum-basic-skills tests. All we did was get the information on
[basic-skills achievement], the hard way."

Other issues considered at the meeting included the need for testing
experts to play a more active role in preventing the public and the
press from overemphasizing--and thus distorting--the meaning of test
scores and the legal problems associated with the testing of teachers
and the handicapped. Other sessions dealt with technical aspects of
test development, administration, and scoring.

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